Field Trip

When Patricia Cornwell wrote her first forensic thriller, in 1990, the amount of evidence required for DNA identification was a drop of blood. Twenty-three years and a twenty-book series later, analysts can make a match using just six skin cells. Not long ago, while celebrating the release of her latest book, “The Bone Bed,” Cornwell dropped by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, where she often goes to stay up to date.

In a tidy office on the ground floor of the building, Cornwell, who is fifty-six and trim and wore a suède jacket and cowboy boots, found her friend Barbara Butcher, the chief of staff at the O.C.M.E., who inspires and informs Cornwell’s novels. Butcher, a wry sixtyish woman in a power suit, recalled how she met Cornwell, in 2008.

“She came to me and begged,” Butcher said.

“I begged and begged you to let me do a photo shoot in the morgue,” Cornwell added. Butcher eventually agreed, and Cornwell was photographed for a book jacket standing beside a metal table in the basement morgue. In exchange, Butcher received a white lab coat embroidered with the name of Cornwell’s protagonist, the medical examiner Kay Scarpetta. Ever since then, Cornwell has donated money to support the O.C.M.E.’s forensic-science training program and has made regular visits from Boston, where she lives.

Butcher explained how a body can end up at the medical examiner’s office. “Let’s say a person went to New York, had no I.D., fell, and died,” Butcher said. Or the person was a victim of a crime. The staff uses anthropology, pathology, DNA analysis, fingerprints, and dental records to find out the person’s identity and how he or she died. In all, some fifty-five hundred bodies are examined every year.

Butcher led Cornwell to the third floor, where four unidentified skeletons were being studied in the forensic-anthropology lab. The bones were arranged on tables draped with black cloth. Cornwell gestured toward a slender scapula bone and asked, “Is this an older person, based on the thinning?”

Bradley Adams, the head of the lab, nodded, and showed her a skull that had a round hole in the forehead and a splintered mass of bone in the back.

“It looks like an entry-exit wound,” Cornwell said.

“Exactly,” Adams said. “But, once you clean it up, you can see the edges are smooth. This is actually a surgical intervention, where you had a shunt in his head to relieve pressure.”

“It would be easy to misinterpret,” Cornwell said, and she seemed to make a mental note. Then she pointed to the small square cushion that supported the skull. “Do you guys order your pillows, or do you make them?”

“They’re from the game Cornhole,” Adams said. “None of us know how to sew, so we have to use beanbags.”

Cornwell has become a skull-rest aficionado, having been in enough morgues to see the range of options. After a stint as a police reporter at the Charlotte Observer, from 1979 to 1981, Cornwell decided that she wanted to write crime novels that were full of authentic details. She was living in Richmond, Virginia, and she called the medical examiner’s office there, hoping to watch a few autopsies.

“It’s not a spectator sport,” Marcella Fierro, Virginia’s deputy medical examiner at the time, told her. “You’re going to have to find some legitimate reason to be here.”

Cornwell became a volunteer police officer, and showed up at Fierro’s office in her new uniform. After a year, she was invited to observe the postmortem examination of an elderly woman. “I walked into the autopsy suite and her gurney was parked in such a way that I literally bumped into it,” Cornwell said. “I looked down, and there she was. For a minute, my knees went weak.”

The medical examiners were perpetually short-staffed, and they hired Cornwell to take notes during autopsies. She found herself in the morgue every day, watching hundreds of bodies get dissected. After six years, she had learned enough to write “Postmortem,” the first of her books to feature the steely-nerved Kay Scarpetta, who is based in part on Fierro.

Cornwell’s last stop at the O.C.M.E. was the office of Charles Hirsch, New York City’s chief medical examiner, who is the inspiration for Scarpetta’s cautious boss, Brian Edison. (Hirsch recently announced that he is retiring.) A dignified man in suspenders, he pointed out a large straw hat that was displayed on a bookshelf.

“Is that a bullet hole?” Cornwell asked.

It was. Some thirty years ago, Hirsch was investigating the death of an African-American man who was shot and killed outside a bar in Cleveland. The bar’s patrons recalled that a bartender had promised to kill the first black man he saw, and headed outside with a rifle. “The question was whether his injury was consistent with that rifle and slug,” Hirsch said, and he turned the hat to reveal three holes of different sizes. “It was a test to demonstrate that a straw hat would faithfully reproduce the projectile of the puncture wound.

“The bartender was convicted, and I went to court dressed in this hat,” Hirsch continued, and he put it on. Cornwell looked intrigued. “I never know when I’ll get an idea for my next book,” she said. ♦